Week 09-16

April 20, 2020

Well, that escalated quickly

I'm pretty sure the gap in the weeknotes was more to do with laziness than pandemics but I think it's a good time to start writing again. I'm definitely one of those people who writes to figure out what I really think about things, and there's a whole lot of things to figure out at the moment.

I'm started writing this on Day 1 of the UK lockdown, and am finishing it 3 weeks later. A few of us agreed on Twitter that it all feels a bit John Wyndham. The full slow domestic disaster vibe has a lot in common with a load of the late 70s/ early 80s series like Survivors (1975), The Changes (also 1975), and The Day of Triffids (1981). We were on a real death trip around then, I would imagine because of the Cold War, so much so that this feels kind of inevitable. It would have been very wasteful to do all that worrying for nothing.

Overall though it feels like sci-fi has let us down a bit on this one. It's too mundane and the risk isn't high enough for writers to have investigated this weird state of civilisation. Our finely-tuned-over-millions-of-years fight or flight response is not very useful in this situation, there's nothing to fight or run away from. Talking to friends it seems I'm not alone in this psychic limbo, there's nothing to do but get on with stuff and try and not doomsurf the news feeds too much.

I'm quite enjoying parts of it.

Working from home for me hasn't really changed my job significantly and I've spent a lot of time wfh during my career so it's not that big a shock. As everyone rightly points out though, we weren't doing it during a global pandemic before. It's hard to concentrate at times, I'm tending to just try and go with the flow - take advantage of the times when my brain is calm for hard work, then do admin/process stuff when it's wobbly. Seems to work most of the time.

In some respects going remote has made my current job easier. If a company goes fully remote, you have to get organised in a way that's easy to neglect when you are all co-located, especially if you have a really high-end development team. Having stuff written down (goals, tasks, processes, etc. etc.) in shared spaces make me feel safer - it's all there, I've not missed anything - which makes me work better.

Anyway, that's enough for today - think I'm going to try and write less more often. Maybe day notes are easier? Plenty of stuff to talk about at the moment, didn't even talk about Devs!

Hope you are all good out there, stay safe xxx